Republican Health Care Disaster

All over the country Americans watched with disgust as the House Republicans rammed through their latest plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, before the Congressional Budget Office, or even members of Congress themselves, had time to read and analyze the bill.

This tweet pretty much summed it up:

×

Trump/GOP pitch to voters in 2018: We’d gladly kill your mother so people who earn hundreds of times what you can pay lower taxes than you.

In its broad outlines, the American Health Care Act is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. It cuts Medicaid funding by 25 percent and allowes states to deny coverage for “pre-existing conditions” –including the condition of being female. Rape, domestic abuse, and being of childbearing age are all conditions that mean you can be denied coverage under the bill.

Scenes of the House vote and the Rose Garden celebration afterward were truly revolting. An overwhelmingly white, male group smiled and applauded the elimination of federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, rushed into the Capitol, wheeling himself on a walker and coming straight from foot surgery that was fully paid for by Congress’s cadillac health insurance plan, to cast a vote that will deny coverage to millions.

After Jimmy Kimmel delivered an emotional monologue about his newborn son’s congenital heart disease and the need to maintain the Affordable Care Act’s guarantee that people like his baby won’t be denied coverage because of their pre-existing conditions, tone-deaf Republicans doubled down on their heartless policy:

Here’s the good news: the Senate has already signaled it has no intention of taking up the House bill as written. (By the time the Senate takes a vote, the official analysis will be done, and the massive damage of the House version will be widely reported). The bad news is, Republicans in both the House and Senate are working overtime to try to overcome their divisions and give Trump a “win” by repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Grassroots activists are hopeful that the repeal efforts will end in failure.

Robert Kraig, executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, points to the massive outpouring at town hall meetings and at a huge rally outside House Speaker Paul Ryan’s district office as signs of trouble for Republicans.

Ryan and Trump “used all their political capital to squeak through a bill that can’t pass in the Senate,” Kraig points out.

That’s despite the widespread feeling among progressive activists right after the 2016 election that an Affordable Care Act repeal was all but inevitable, he adds.

“We’ve got to remember we’ve come a long way,” Kraig says. “The House was always considered the easy part, and they barely got it through with two votes.”

That would not have been the case if there had not been a huge public backlash against the Republican plan to withdraw health-care coverage from millions of people.

People’s Action, Indivisible, MoveOn, and other groups helped drive the rallies, protests, and raucous town halls, but “it was more than organizing by any group,” says Kraig.

In part, the backlash was driven by the internal divisions and the sheer haplessness of the Republicans. On the one hand, Trump and moderate Republicans adopted a progressive position, promising to reduce the cost of health-care coverage and expand access. On the other hand, Freedom Caucus members including Joe Walsh and Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, loudly asserted that the rich should not have to pay for heath care for poor people, and those “who live good lives” and are healthy should not have to contribute to insurance that covers people with expensive medical conditions.

For the far right to make it an overt goal to withdraw coverage from people with pre-existing conditions is “political malpractice,” Kraig notes.

Still, Democrats should not be smug. When Democratic members began singing “Na, na, na, na . . . hey, hey, goodbye” to their Republican colleagues in the House—taunting them for taking a vote the Dems hope will be an act of political suicide—they were hitting the wrong note.

No one should celebrate a bill that could cause as much pain and death as the American Health Care Act, regardless of the final outcome.

The better response was Senator Tammy Baldwin’s: “The people of Wisconsin did not send me to Washington to take people’s health care away. I will not support higher costs, fewer people with health-care coverage and more economic insecurity for Wisconsin families.”

Republican Senator Ron Johnson, whose office is besieged by protesters today, has said he would need “a lot more information” before casting a vote.